This week I tested my paper prototype of my counter application, which I did iterate once based on one person’s feedback. I realized as I tested that I probably should have made empty screens, since the pre-populated ones that showed functionality seemed to confuse people.
I asked three of my coworkers and my parents to help me. I learned that my parents need to wear glasses to interact with their iPhones. Through the conversation I also realized my mom has trouble with the iPhone keyboard, which reminded me of testing button size, which was mentioned in class. It was challenging to not continually converse with everyone, since I know them so well, and they kept on looking to me to give guidance or answer questions.
Everyone was asked the same introductory and task questions. First, I just asked everyone about their routine, to try to get an idea of things they might keep track of. Then, I asked how they like to keep organized, to see what tools came up. A few people joked that they don’t keep organized, but also nearly everyone mentioned a calendar application and to-do lists, either on their phone or on paper. The tasks were:
- Create a new item to keep track of the number of times you go to the gym this week. You want to go four times.
- Create a new item to count down to your friend’s wedding on April 2nd.
- Increment the number of days you want to go on vacation down one.
Lessons Learned
- Nearly everyone had to work through figuring out how to count down, and since I phrased the question as counting down toward a date, they looked for some kind of date or calendar functionality that did not exist.
- A few people also mistook the increment screens for the goal setting screen, and made changes to one or both to set the start and goal numbers. maybe something about the goal-setting screen makes it not obviously the place to do this.
- My mom kept on hitting the reset button, seeming to think that would set her changes. Of course on non-paper there would be more instant visual cues that something happened.
- Not everyone navigated through to the individual item pages, which partially supports the functions to increment on the landing page, and partially makes me think it should be clear that the items themselves are clickable.